PAIK TIMES FIVE

Paik Times Five is part of Infinite Loop exhibition, organized by the New Museum and curated by Lauren Cornell. The exhibition was presented in Seoul, South Korea by Calvin Klein. Created in tribute to the legendary video art pioneer, Nam June Paik, the exhibit featured artists whose works carry on the exploration of technology and participatory art – a movement Paik helped ignite in the 1960s. Paik Times Five was one of the three specially commissioned interactive video installations premiering at the event. Rafaël Rozendaal and Scott Snibbe created the other two installations, and a curated program of single channel videos was displayed on the world’s largest LED screen (towering at twenty-three stories tall).

The imagery is generated by the viewer’s movement: each person leaves behind them graphic traces in the virtual space. Various media (sourced online) are the raw material for this imagery — the viewer ‘paints’ the space with colors and textures of those videos.

The viewer can fully reveal the video by holding his or her arms out and standing still. Any movement however, will distort and break apart the source video. The installation depends on the viewer moving between these two extremes: the passive watching of the media and the active creating of the imagery from this source.

Each of the viewers leaves behind imagery which is based on his or her movement, and which is also altered to have unique qualities of its own. Below you can see the relationship of the viewer’s movement to the images he or she creates. Window in the upper left shows the Kinect camera input, which results in the imagery on the right. The colors and textures of the imagery are taken from the pixels of the source video.
Each time the viewer lowers his or her arms, the source video changes to another, picked at random from a library of different video sources.